As you look for ways to better market your business, the long direct-mail letter provides a classic and frequently overlooked option. Constructing high-quality, long direct-mail letters can be time intensive or call for bringing in a professional copywriter, but it can offer you benefits that few other marketing approaches can match.

Comprehensive Coverage of Benefits

Space or time limitations often dictate that marketing materials focus on a few key benefits in an attempt to arouse interest. Long direct-mail letters, by design, take as much space as necessary to convey the full range of features, functions and benefit a product or service offers. Not every person who opens a long direct-mail letter reads every word, but many do because they want to understand everything they stand to gain by purchasing. In ideal circumstances, the long direct-mail letter does everything in the sales process, except collecting money, by covering every inch of ground between identifying the problem and asking for the sale.

Building Familiarity and Trust

Long direct-mail letters allow for personal touches not practical in other marketing approaches. Printing technology makes it feasible to place the customer’s name in letter’s salutation, not just the envelope. This level of personalization helps build a perception of familiarity and indicates that you view the customer as important. The long letter approach also gives you the chance to engage in storytelling and write in a conversational tone, as one might speak to a friend. This personal element helps to establish rapport and create a sense of trust between you and reader.

Tracking Results

Tracking represents a core problem for many marketing and advertising campaigns. Television and radio stations can only provide best guesses about viewer and listener numbers and no specific data about a particular ad. Newspapers and periodicals know their circulation numbers, but also cannot provide data on how many people see the marketing material. Long direct-mail letters go out to a specific number of people and the results boil down to the exact number of people that respond. In essence, direct mail allows for direct results tracking.

Considerations

Not every sales problem calls for a long direct-mail letter as the solution. Long direct mail typically works better with expensive items, as high prices tend to create significant resistance a long letter can help overcome. Your business may also take a hit in reputation, as some businesses make false or overreaching claims in these letters for the sole purpose of making a sale. Sticking to legitimate and demonstrable benefits and features in the letter can mitigate some of the potential reputation damage. Due to the high cost of printing and the low cost of web hosting, many businesses now prefer to create web-based versions of long direct-mail letters.

About the Author

I have been working as a freelance writer recently. However, the majority of my recent work has been ghostwriting or required a non-disclosure agreement. As such, providing a truly meaningful representative piece is somewhat difficult. I have included the address to my blog on philosophy. It will naturally suffer from all the problems blog writing suffers from, but it should provide a sense of how I write should you choose to read it.